From Esquire

The president's ongoing spiral into desperation and delusion has provided the odd moment of clarity. That the President of the United States has responded to his decisive loss in a free and fair election by talking about martial law in the Oval Office ought to put to bed any notion he considers himself a servant to the public imbued with power through the will of the people. He is an enemy of democracy, and of the American project. This guy is trying to stay in power and out of legal jeopardy at any cost—though as usual, he won't be picking up the tab—which now means, according to Axios, using "DHS or the military to impound voting machines" for some dipshit investigation.

There was never any evidence or coherent argument that the election had actually been stolen from Donald Trump, at least within the bounds of observable reality. That's why they've lost 50 court cases. It was always a feeling that he shouldn't have lost—couldn't have lost—because the Real citizens of America had voted for him. The people who voted for his opponent, all 7 million more of them, had no right to choose the president. And so the conspiracies began to work backward from the conclusion, twisting and sprawling out, first with talk of how there was massive voter fraud in swing-state cities with large Black populations, then with wild tales of voting machines and Venezuela. The conclusion to be reached in the real world—that most Americans did not want Donald Trump to be president anymore—was simply unacceptable. It had to be buried away, battered beyond recognition, so there could be revealed the ultimate truth: that Trump was the true president of these United States.

In his way, Dr. Sebastian Gorka, PhD, made all this plain. Stroke my lizard brain, he told the MyPillow Guy. Make me feel aggrieved, enraged, afraid. At this point, the talk of how the election was rigged is not based in anything that actually happened, nor is it required to make much sense. By stating it, you assert your allegiance to The Movement. It is a litmus test, a loyalty oath. You can get down into the details, reciting the conjuring words to show just how committed you are. Or you can just talk loudly about how mad you are. Either works. This is what Walter Benjamin called "the introduction of aesthetics into political life." The president and his loyalists are engaged in a kind of theatrical performance, a made-for-TV production of the great War on the many Enemies. You need only signal that you believe the show must go on.